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D.C.’s Barry Wants Inmates Tested for HIV

ewiley — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:57:23 +0000

Former Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, now a member of the City Council, wants all inmates in the city jail tested for HIV/AIDS. In a bill he proposed recently, Barry urges that authorities collect blood from inmates, including those convicted of a sex crime, as they enter the D.C. Jail. Following the test, prisoners would be provided counseling, under the bill, which has been stalled in committee since July. “Lives are being lost, breadwinners are being lost, family members are being lost,” a Barry spokesman told The Washington Post. “We need to be doing all that we can in this serious situation.” Barry notes that the District of Columbia has an “alarming HIV/AIDS rate, reminding that at least 3 percent of the city’s residents – some 15,000 people – are living with the virus, the highest known rate in the nation, the Post reports. What’s even more alarming, many experts say, is the number of D.C. residents who don’t even know they have HIV/AIDS. Recent studies have shown that nearly a third of those tested for HIV are inmates at the D.C. Jail. “If you look at how the epidemic is spreading, there is a high prevalence [of the virus] in the jail population,” D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray (D), one of the bill’s co-sponsors, told the Post. “People are bringing it back to our community, which really is continuing to spread the virus.” Nationally, 21 states test inmates for HIV when they first arrive. Still, most of those only do so with inmates’ consent or upon court order, according to the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. “Since 2006, when the voluntary HIV testing program was launched, 99 percent, or more than 27,000, inmates have opted to take the test.” the Post writes. Some warn that Barry’s plan could actually deter inmates from participating in voluntary testing. “Our fear is that if you put in place a mandatory program, you not only have very little to gain but you may actually be undermining a good program that we already have in place,” said Walter Smith, executive director of D.C. Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, a public policy organization that supports HIV testing but opposes the bill. Both D.C. Corrections Director Devon Brown and HIV/AIDS Administration Director Shannon Hader said they oppose mandatory testing.

One in Two Youths Are Unaware of Their HIV Infection

ewiley — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:51:03 +0000

Nearly half of HIV-positive young people don’t realize that they’ve been infected, according to U.S. health officials. In fact, says the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fewer than a quarter – 22 percent – of sexually active high school students are tested for the virus, which causes AIDS. “At the end of 2006, an estimated 48 percent of adolescents and young adults infected with HIV were unaware of their infection, representing missed opportunities for diagnosis, treatment, and reduction in the number of new HIV transmissions,” the CDC said. Using data from a 2007 survey of ninth- to 11th-graders, the CDC found that people ages 12 to 24 represented 4.4 percent of the estimated 1.1 million people in the United States infected with HIV. Still, that number represented 10 percent of the estimated 232,700 people living with the virus without knowing it. The CDC recommends that doctors offer HIV screening as part of routine checkups for U.S. high school students.

WORLD: Thousands of Africans Wrongly Diagnosed as HIV Positive;World Lens Photos; African nation welcomes Pope Benedict XVI

ewiley — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 11:19:03 +0000

Thousands of Africans Wrongly Diagnosed as HIV Positive

Thousands of east Africans were wrongly diagnosed as HIV positive because of cheap, rapid tests used in poor nations and administered at VCT centers. A study published in The EastAfrican included 6,255 people, ages 18 to 60, at a village in Masaka and the Kakira sugar plantations, in Uganda and a coastal village in Kilifi and a slum in Kangemi estate in Nairobi. Two different tests done on all 6,255 people found that 131 had “discrepant” results — where one is positive and the other negative, the report said. Read more.

World Lens: Grace Jones hits Germany; the pope’s in Africa. See pics.

African nation welcomes Pope Benedict XVI
Pope Benedict XVI touched down in Cameroon Wednesday amid growing backlash about his comments against condom use. The pope, making his very first visit to the continent in his role, refused to back down on the Catholic church’s ban against condoms, upsetting many health officials, reports CNN. In his comments Tuesday, he even went as far as to say that condoms were the cause of the spread of AIDS. HIV and AIDS have devastated sub-Saharan Africa; according to an UNAIDS/World Health Organization report, more than 22 million people in the region are infected with HIV. In addition, nine out of 10 children who have HIV are from sub-Saharan Africa and the region has 11.4 million children orphaned because of AIDS. Despite the stance against condoms, the Catholic Church is probably the largest privately funded provider of HIV care worldwide, according to CNN’s Vatican analyst John Allen. The pope has put together a group of scientists and theologians to contemplate whether married couples should be allowed to use condoms, if one of them had the HIV virus. The pope will end his visit to the continent with a stop in Angola.

World: Global Economic Crisis Will Cost Africa Billions; U.S. AIDS Program Did Wonders in Guyana

hbarber — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 12:52:16 +0000

Global Economic Crisis Will Cost Africa Billions By the end of 2009, Africa’s economy stands to lose up to $49 billion due to the global economic crisis, according to research from ActionAid. Almost half of the amount –$27 billion – is due to a drop in foreign aid, earnings from exports and money from richer nations who are struggling through recession, reports the BBC. “Although developing countries didn’t make this crisis, it has become all too clear that they are in the firing line when it comes to suffering its worst effects,” said an ActionAid official. Countries that were making progress in recent years could start to backslide. “There is a real risk that development will start to go backwards in many countries as the money dries up and that the recession will lead to worsening poverty and terrible consequences for the men, women and children caught in its grip.” The country set to suffer the most is South Africa, the report says, because of the drop in foreign income.

U.S. AIDS Program Did Wonders in Guyana Guyana’s AIDS prevention program, sponsored by the United States, has helped cut the nation’s HIV rate by almost 2 percent, according to the government. The Caribbean nation’s infection rate dropped down from almost 3 percent to about 1 percent, reports the BBC. The government has been able to monitor the program’s success by testing almost half of the nation. The numbers prompted one of the nation’s health officials to call the program, which started five years ago and is headed up by the U.S. Agency for International Development, a “huge success story.” The program, which cost $20 million, focused on both awareness and prevention.

HEALTH: Obama Names AIDS Policy Director

ewiley — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 12:38:24 +0000

President Barack Obama has appointed Georgetown University health policy expert Jeffrey S. Crowley to head the Office of National AIDS Policy. Crowley, a former activist with the National Association of People with AIDS, will coordinate efforts to reduce new HIV infections, according to an administration official. “I welcome the president’s appointment of Jeffrey Crowley to head the Office of National AIDS Policy, and his continued commitment to developing and implementing a National AIDS Strategy,” said Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.). “With the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting that annual cases of HIV/AIDS in the United States are 40 percent higher than previous estimates, we need a National AIDS Strategy to better coordinate and guide our response to this devastating disease. Any such strategy must include clear and ambitious targets to reduce HIV infection rates, increased access to testing, care, and treatment, and it must focus on the communities who have been most impacted by this disease – especially African Americans and young gay men.” Some 1.1 million Americans are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Roughly 16,000 more Americans are becoming infected each year than previously estimated, with 56,300 new HIV infections in 2006, according to CDC figures.

HEALTH: Young Black Gays Still Gambling in the Sex Game

ewiley — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 12:49:07 +0000

Many young HIV-positive Black men in the South engaged in risky behavior, never believing that would get infected, a new survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed. More than half of the 29 gay or bisexual men – who were in their teens or early-20s – said they had engaged in unprotected anal sex in the year before they were infected and had had sex with slightly older men, the survey found. Both are risky behaviors, yet the vast majority of the young men said they had not thought that they would ever be infected. Young Black gay and bisexual men are becoming infected with HIV at alarming rates, particularly in the South, and health officials are trying to analyze their risk factors in order to refine education and intervention strategies. “We need to make sure that HIV infection does not become a rite of passage for young Black men who have sex with men,” said Dr. Alexandra Oster, one of the authors of the survey published last week in the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. After the Mississippi State Department of Health notified the C.D.C. in late 2007 that the number of new H.I.V. diagnoses had spiked at a sexually transmitted disease clinic serving Jackson, Miss., , the agencies teamed up to do the survey. The number of newly diagnosed HIV cases among all Black men in the Jackson area had increased 20 percent between 2004-2005 and 2006-2007, but infections among those ages 17 to 25 had jumped 45 percent.

WORLD: Zimbabwe Prints Trillion-dollar Bills; NIgerian Nurses Strike in Barbados

ewiley — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 12:26:27 +0000

Zimbabwe Bank Prints 100 Trillion-dollar Bills
As a result of having the world’s highest inflation rate, Zimbabwe’s central bank announced it’ll be printing $100 trillion bills soon, reports CNN. “In a move meant to ensure that the public has access to money from banks, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe has introduced a new family of bank notes that gradually will come into circulation, starting with the 10 trillion Zimbabwe dollar,” said the bank in a statement. The bank is also set to release 50-trillion, 20-trillion and 10-trillion dollar notes. The trillion-dollar bills are worth about $300 U.S. dollars. A loaf of bread costs about 300 billion Zimbabwe dollars and is increasing each day. The official inflation rate was 231 million percent as of July and merchants along with working-class people are struggling to keep up. Because of the rapidly deteriorating Zimbabwe dollar, many are refusing to accept payment in the country’s currency, preferring either the U.S. dollar or South African rand or the Botswana pula instead. Doctors and teachers have left their jobs in mass, demanding that they be paid in foreign currency. The doctors’ strike comes at a time when the nation is in the grips of a cholera epidemic; the teacher strike has left schools unable to reopen this year.

Nigerian Nurses Strike in Barbados
Nigerian nurses, employed at a hospital in Barbados, walked off their jobs Tuesday, reports Caribbean Net. The nurses, who work at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, were reacting to a news report by the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) that aired Monday night. According to the report, three Nigerian nurses died of AIDS while working at the hospital. The nurses are requesting that the National Union of Public Workers take care of the issue. In addition, the Nigeria Nurses Association is demanding the CBC retract the report, saying it hurt the nurses’ reputation as professionals. The CBC isn’t budgin, though. “We stand by what we carried. We stand by the veracity of our report,” Richard Cox, CBC’s director of news, told a local paper.

HEALTH: Dallas Reconsiders Condom Ban

ewiley — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 11:54:16 +0000

In Dallas, which has the highest HIV rate in Texas, commissioners are considering whether to overturn a law that makes it illegal for county health officials to distribute free condoms. Fourteen years ago, health workers routinely went into high-risk neighborhoods to hand out condoms and sterilized needles. But in 1995, a thin majority of commissioners ruled that the program actually promoted illegal and immoral behavior. Over the past decade and a half, however, the HIV/AIDS rate has skyrocketed, particularly among poor and African-American communities in the county. County Judge Jim Foster, who supports reversing the condom policy, says he has enough votes to overturn the ban. “We should have never had it to start with,” he said. Kenneth Mayfield, one of the commissioners who voted for the ban, would now like to see limited distribution of condoms. Under his plan, condoms would be given out only after the recipients received counseling about their risky behaviors and were told that condoms are not 100 percent effective. In addition, under Mayfield’s proposal, county health workers could give free condoms only to high-risk individuals with HIV/AIDS or a sexually transmitted disease, those who have had sex with someone infected with the virus or an STD, and those who have had sex with prostitutes. Mayfield’s order would ban condom distribution in schools or “any venues where children are present.”

HEALTH: Nurses Join Forces to Serve Africa’s AIDS Patients

ewiley — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 11:19:31 +0000

American nurses specially trained in HIV/AIDS care are heading to Africa to assist that continent’s overworked medical staffs, allAfrica.com reports. Under the Nurses Strengthening Our AIDS Response (SOAR) program, nurses join forces from the Georgetown University School of Nursing and Health Studies in Washington, the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, the Duke University School of Nursing in North Carolina, the Catholic Medical Mission Board in New York and health care organizations throughout Lesotho, South Africa and Swaziland. The purpose of Nurses SOAR is to strengthen nurses’ capacity to deliver HIV/AIDS services by building the leadership skills of nurses, building communities of self-care, building HIV/AIDS knowledge and clinical skills, and emphasizing applying the knowledge in clinical nursing care. In 2007, sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 75 percent of AIDS deaths and 67 percent of people living with HIV, according to the United Nations’ biennial report on HIV/AIDS. Much of the burden of caring for the stricken has fallen to nurses.

Health: What Can You Do About HIV/AIDS?

hbarber — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:56:46 +0000

What can you do about HIV/AIDS? What is your personal responsibility for fighting HIV and AIDS, Vital Signs asks on the 20th anniversary of World AIDS Day. As Black Americans make up nearly half of all Americans living with HIV, Vital Signs wants to know what are you willing to do to stop the spread of HIV and AIDS? To weigh in, go to Vital Signs.